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I fail to see how an automated message saying "A message you didn't send to someone you don't know couldn't be delivered" is useful.

It's not. And if you've got an algorithm that can determine when to silently drop mail on the floor with no false positives, I'm all ears. But RFC 2821, s4.2.5 is quite clear on an MTA's responsibilities after it accepts a message. I don't think picking and choosing which bits of an RFC to implement is a good idea.

If you can detect that the message contains a virus, don't send the virus back. If you can detect which virus the message contains, you can tell whether the virus spoofs e-mail addresses. If it does, don't even send a bounce.

I gather from the fact that so many of these bounce messages say "Your message tested positive for Sobig" that both points are actually possible — and pratical.

If C accepted the message and silently refused to deilver it then why would B retry? That makes no sense.

As Schwern pointed out the anti-virus vendors do know which virus is which and they do know which ones spoof sender addresses so of course they shouldn't bounce those ones back to the 'sender'. They should simply say '200 Hmm Yummy' and do nothing more.

But I have an even simpler rule... Never generate a bounce response when a virus is detected. Any virus. Ever. By all means have your virus scan